For the Intelligent Book circuit teaching tool, the team keen to use XML-RPC to communicate between the client and the server. However,
the applet security model prevents unsolicited XML-RPCs from being made to an applet client. To work around this, I have put together
an applet which makes XML-RPCs to the server and expects the response to be a list of XML-RPCs to make to applets in the same applet
context (ie, on the same page and with the same "codebase" attribute).
"Jade" is a circuit diagram application originally written by Chris Terman, James Knight and Milan Minsky at MIT for use in the 6.004
lecture course. I have made a number of modifications to the application to get it
My PhD work forms part of the CMI Intelligent Book project,
which is a joint project between the Computer Laboratory and MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
The first thing we are looking at is a form of interactive tutorial for teaching analogue and digital electronics to first year students.
These pages have got quite out of date, and I'm gradually fixing them up. There are quite a few test pages showing various odd bits of project
that I'll add in here soon.
Modified Jade (circuit diagram system)
"Jade" is a circuit diagram application originally written by Chris Terman, James Knight and Milan Minsky at MIT for use in the 6.004
lecture course.
For the intelligent book project, I have been making large modifications to Jade. These include enabling circuit currents and voltages to
be marked up on the circuit, adding an XPath API to a allow a external applications to set property values in the circuit, allowing Attributes
to be recorded on properties (needed for the API), fixing up the applet code, and a few other things.
Amir Hirsch assisted with the applet code by making a rough pass over the original Jade to identify which bits prevented it from running
as an applet.
Draft lesson scenarios.
These scenarios were created during the early design phase of the project. They are scripts showing student and system interaction
during a hypothetical lesson. The layout of the user interface is not described here, only the interaction.
Old SVG drawing tool pages
Early in the project, I started looking at putting together a very basic SVG drawing applet, built on top of Apache's Batik project.
The idea was to build something fairly quickly that would be able to display and modify the circuit elements, and to be able to
re-adapt this applet to other domains (for example, timing diagrams). This work was put on hold before it got very far, because we
were given access to the development tree of an existing Java circuit diagramming tool (Chris Terman's "Jade"). I am now busily
building the features I need into Jade instead.
Still to add
Initial use case pdf (old design). Layout sketches, and description of how they came about. Interaction Area (design pdf & link the
html demo in). Description / link to architecture. Future direction.